A Little Bit Dotty

Hello readers. It’s that time of the year when I start preparing for a whole lot of card making for the next couple of months. A couple of weeks ago I started with re-arranging my work space and storage solutions. My space now feels more open and I feel re-enerigized. And with that I turned my attention to making a card just for the sheer pleasure of it.

.

The Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week was to go all Dotty and use spots and dots in our creations. I went searching for the perfect spotty dotty print from my Gelatin print stash. I mostly print onto Manilla folders which makes a great card base and the larger size of the folders also means I can die cut them using a Sizzix Bigz XL. Here I die cut the Ornate Tri-fold card for the base. Since this is the first time I tried making a card with this die I discovered that I need to consider how to create a closure in future. Live and learn.

.

Naturally a lot of the printed design gets lost in the layers on the front, so I’ve bought you around the back to show off some of that dotty goodness. I have a variety of stencils and impression tools for getting dots onto my print and I’m not afraid to use them all as I work thru the layers. Just love dots! When using the prints for card making however I always use the permanent Archival Ink for the sponged edges. The water based dye inks will not work on top of the acrylic painted surface of the print. The technique for applying the sponged ink is still the same though.

.

Flipping back the front panel reveals the peek-a-boo sentiment. I layered up the die cut Spellbinders labels. Since this was a dotty challenge and I was having too much fun just messing about I found some dot paper and a dot embossing folder for the label panels. It’s probably way over the top but if you can’t have fun with your craft ….well it ‘s just not fun eh?

.

I went all out with die cutting for the front of the card. The bird (Sizzix) is cut from a spotty orange Gelatin print, and he is sitting on his branch (Sizzix Alterations) amongst the leaves (Cheery Lynn) and flowers (Sizzix Alterations). There came a point when I was just about to call this card Done, but the bare insides were mocking me with their plain-ness. There could only be one solution to this problem. More dots! Stencils dots this time.

This was a quirky card to make and I quite enjoyed the challenge of using my prints as the foundation.